Artist of the Week

Artist: Ella WalkerArtform: Musician​What do you do and what are your main focuses?By trade I’m a sound engineer, but in my spare time I’m a sound designer, composer and percussionist.​Where have you studied?​I studied my BMus at the University of Manchester, and went on to study an MA in Sound Design at Bournemouth University.

Tell us about 'Rosewood'.So the work I’ve chosen to feature is something I wrote back in my third year of uni, for my final composition project. It’s titled Rosewood and combined my two musical passions, electroacoustic music and percussions. In a nutshell it is an interactive piece for Marimba, Xylosynth and Electronics which broadly comments on the endangered state of the prime material used to create most marimbas and xylophones – Rosewood. It has a cyclical nature to it, starting with a simple choral that develops to integrate the electronics, and almost question the use of electronic instruments for percussionists, and then returns to the choral. The xylosynth plays two roles; it works using MIDI, and therefore I programmed half the keyboard to cue the fixed material, and the other half as a sampler that varied the sample depending on the velocity with which each note was struck.

Why do you compose?I suppose there are many reasons why, but one is that I find it a very good emotional outlet. I also love learning and exploring sound. One of the best things about using sound to create music rather than just an instrument is that I can fiddle around a recording and every single time create something so different from the last thing. Being able to just spend hours playing around creating wacky sounds is really cool.

Above are two pieces by Ella Walker called "Inscapes". One is processed (left) and the other is unprocessed (right). They were experimental pieces linked to her Master's degree thesis "What affect does audio processing have on the emotional impact of sound in relation to image?"

​Who are you influenced by?I always find these sorts of questions difficult to answer. In a way I am influenced by everyone and that doesn’t mean just musicians. I often have people in mind when I compose, and these thoughts bring back memories that generate emotions, and so whoever I have spent time with or have seen when I compose often influences how the piece sounds. ​

​What are you afraid of?I guess I am afraid of people not liking what I produce. Often I get hung up on if somebody will like a certain choice, but I guess at the end of the day I’m pretty much always just composing it for me, and it doesn’t really matter if people like it or not. It is always the ‘why’ that is important, and by asking that question to people then their opinions are constructive either way.

What is the most exciting thing you have done to date?I had the most fantastic experience in July of this year sound designing a youth theatre production. The company – Theatre for Life – put on two performances of an extremely thought provoking and immersive piece of theatre. I met the director when she came into my work at the time to buy a keyboard. We got talking and almost a year later, the whole creative team and hard-working cast managed to pull off something I think all of us at some point had thought was perhaps a bit ambitious. For me as the sound designer, I had to create soundscapes, edit music, and do spot effects. It was challenging working in a completely new genre and getting to grips with the software to run not just the sound but all the projected media from, but tremendous fun and very rewarding.

What is more important, talent or hard work?Hard work, and I say that because although some people suit certain things more than others, nobody is born knowing everything. It is the work we put in to learn new things that develops into talent.

Anything interesting coming up soon?I’m currently working on a few short films, doing the postproduction sound, so I’m looking forward to sharing those with the world soon. Of course the 'Handel's Messiah: Reimagined 2018' concert for Collective31 is going to be very exciting.